Hallelujah
by Mariagoner
Summary: Beginnings can also be endings and in every ending, something begins. The last story in the Uses of Enchantment series. LarsaPenelo, Vayne, Gabranth, Drace, Gramis, Basch.


My last story of the UOE series. My last story of the year. My last story penned as a single woman.

This is the last of plenty of things, which is why I am somewhat paranoid over having written it badly. (Especially the first two and last two sections, which I have despaired at and rewritten at least three times each and which refuse to flow well regardless.) But regardless of my neuroses, I'm putting this up and getting this over with before 2008 comes and goes. It's nice to have a head-start on the new year, yes? ;)

And in any case, I just want to thank you everyone I've ever had the pleasure of knowing in this fandom for giving me a great year spent reading and writing and participating in possibly the warmest, friendliest and coziest online community I've ever been in. There have been the occasional rough patches, oh yes, but on the whole, I can't fully express how much enjoyment and kindness I feel I've been given. So thank you once more and I promise-- come January, I'm looking forward to catching up with you as a newly married woman!

* * *

Title: Hallelujah

Fandom: Final Fantasy XII

Series: The Uses of Enchantment

Characters/Pairings: Larsa/Penelo, Vayne, Gabranth, Gramis, Drace, Basch

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Beginnings can also be endings and in every ending, something begins. The last story in the Uses of Enchantment series.

* * *

1.

There are autumn leaves in her hair the first day that she returns to Archades, during the first eve she comes back.

A part of him, the one that his brother had often praised to the skies, had never expected to see her again. It was all well, of course, to promise to write and visit and keep to touch, to remember to be a friend. But doing so would require willful blindness to what she was and what he was, to all the duties he had before him and all the thousand little freedoms she squandered and played with and kept. He knew that even if she kept those promises, she'd do it first out of kindness and then out of duty and then, finally, out of nostalgia for their end. And the years would simply keep taking more and more and more from them, until even affection couldn't mend the ties that had snapped.

There were just too many things that made them different, he knew. Too many divisions to try and navigate for what he could never have.

His last glimpse of her had been as she had stood on the parapet in Rabanstre, waving her arms out in goodbye as he and the new Gabranth had taken off for a far colder land. And this was the last picture he had ever thought he would carry of her: hair loose and face smiling, arms extended out as though to touch him, part of an irretrievable past.

Three days afterwards, he had become the emperor of Archadia, the sovereign nation of a lumbering giant whose head had swelled large enough to topple off its constitutional neck. There had been papers to sign and coronations to tend to, masses to beguile and politicians to dispose of, dead woman to honor quietly and dead men to bury as discreetly-- in short, more than enough to try and forget, to resign himself to what he couldn't have.

He had never thought he would see her again; for her sake, he tried to be glad.

But when she somehow comes before him a month after he sees her, he can't turn away and pretend any longer. Even if it's for her own good, he _can't_.

"I hope you don't mind me visiting you," she tells Larsa after arguing, bargaining, flirting and occasionally stomping her way to an unorthodox royal audience. "But I know you're probably lonely and I know you've lost people already and I thought maybe you could use a friend."

* * *

2.

'Till the end of her days, she will never quite explain why she had arrived when she had.

Others ask her, of course, and he is nearly always there to witness it. Rumors follow them both for years: that she had been a vixen out to defile him, that he had been a royal incubus out to corrupt her, that they had-- in an astonishing display of courtship synchrony-- set out mutual traps. She says yes to some rumors, no to others, and keeps the world speculating what was true even after her death.

When anyone in his court asks, she always smiles as brightly as his medallions and tells them that she had simply been a hopeless vamp trying to get her hooks into the emperor when he had been young enough to fall for her threadbare charms. After all, she laughs later, it isn't as though they'd think any other answer suitable to the task.

When their eventual children question them, she merely quips that never mind the _why_, they should just be glad it _had_ happened and did they _really_ want to know more considering their father's voice hadn't even cracked by then? And when their faces blanch in the way so characteristic of her own family, all he can do is laugh.

And when the time comes for his fingers to drop from hers at lat, she will simply tell him that loving him had never been easy but it had still managed to set her just as free as she had tried to do for him. And after that, there are no words and nothing crouched in sentences, nothing so base at that.

He never asks directly himself, however. There is no real reason to, and no better answer than the one she had already given.

_I thought you could use a friend_, she had said. And if she had known him so well, there was really nothing left to ask.

* * *

3.

"If you stay here," he tells her later in his private quarter, "you'll be tried most dearly. Not for anything is the court in Archades home to the most vicious gossips in the land. The words they'll brand you with, the reputation they'll pass on, the slurs they'll slip into every hiss-- it will follow you beyond the boundaries of this land, mark itself within every relationship you will have."

"I know," she says, and smiles at the thought of the intricate ridiculousness of such things, at the thought of any _she_ loved actually giving a damn. "But we first met in Bhujerba, you didn't give a damn about any of that when you saved me. You did just what you thought you ought to, didn't you?"

He cannot look at her quite evenly then; it's too painful, almost, to think of what he had been when he had first met her, of what dreams he had carried just then.

"I am no longer that boy," he admits, and suppresses a sigh when his eyes slide across her skin. "To be emperor is to be lover to all the world's strange duplicities and, strange though it might seem, I no longer have the power to shelter you so carefully. Perhaps I never have. But then, perhaps I was always fooling myself and my own kin with my promises in the past."

And he waits for one heartbeat, and then the next, and the next, expecting that any moment she will look down and turn away, as disappointed by his own inadequacies as any he had ever loved had been.

He probably should know by now that surprise is her forte, however, and that she knows all too well how to parley whatever the world expects from her into something else. And when he finally plucks up the courage to look at her, she is simply looking at him calmly, a bird ready more to roost than to fly past the place she wishes to land.

"If you were," she says warmly, "you fooled me and the world too. I always thought you played the part of the dashing prince ridiculously well. Even if--" (And she smiles as she takes in all his changes) "--the brave prince could use a change of clothes since he's grown at least an inch since _this_ grateful maiden saw him last."

* * *

4.

He orders a new suite of clothes just to please her, to coax her own smile back into play and see the worry fade from her eyes. He discards the red of his empire temporarily and instead chooses green for her eyes and gold for her hair and blue for the patterns he's already seen her covertly applying to her skin. And when he stands before the mirror of his tailor's rooms at last, he can barely recognize the sight of himself-- and is shocked by how he feels at the idea of changing, how stupidly and ferociously _glad_.

"You know," she says at her first sight of him after, "I always _did_ think you'd look amazing when you put on some actual pants."

He holds his arms gallantly to the side and does his best not to blush like the heart-sick fool he just might be, like a pup who mistook the kindness of others for something more than that. "Amazing enough to escort you to your private quarters, my lady? Without appearing _too_ much a cad?"

"More than amazing enough," she says, and her hands slip effortlessly into the crook of his arm for all that she still has an inch on him. "Larsa, you look more than good. You look--"

* * *

5.

There will be other compliments, Larsa knows, that will be paid to him as is due to the majesty of his rank. Diplomats will bend to their knees and foreign rulers will incline their necks and pretty girls with practiced manners will come to bat their eyelashes and whisper discreet promises, flattering him to the sky with insinuations of desire and desperation and the need to have him curled within their laps.

And yet, for all that, their words and gestures mean so little, insincere bits of fluff and speckle that quickly and easily pass.

But the evening after their third day together, he stands in front of his mirrors and studies his own face, flushing at the memory of her wide eyes and her rising voice, her parted lips and her splayed up lashes.

"Larsa," she had said, and there had been butterflies in his stomach and sweat on his palms, a rough rhythm to his heart and a hitch to his breath. "Larsa, you just keep surprising me. You almost look like a _man_."

* * *

6.

"I'm doing perfectly all right," he lies to her carefully during their fifth day together, looking somewhere beyond her eyes and her lips, her hair and her skin, the impression of her palm on his hand. "You've been of such help in circumstances as difficult as these-- but I've delayed you too much already, anchored you to a place of injury when you might prosper elsewhere."

She looks at him for a second and his breath draws in. "Are you… Larsa, are you saying you want me to…?

"Leave?" he interrupts quickly, not wanting to hear her voice too much, lest it be enough to dissuade him then. "No, of course not. I would not desire you do that. But though my circumstances may be difficult, those of my line-- we've faced far worse than mere family politics and upheavals. Even without your assistance, grateful though I am for it, I'll be sure to find ease of mind eventually. I need not disrupt your life in the process of doing simply that."

He lies, of course, deftly and carefully-- well enough to make even his brother pause, to confuse the guardians he had once had. He knows enough of his brother's techniques to smooth his words out beforehand, and enough of his father's faithlessness to know that he had best slide his eyes from about her own, to distrust true contact.

He does not want to watch her her walk away; he has had enough of abandonment to last several lifetimes, much less than the thirteen years he has already clawed past. But better to send her off while he could still stand to hear her steps fade, rather than when he grew to need her presence. Before he became a desperate man.

But Penelo's eyes are disbelieving, even in his peripheral vision, and what she says afterwards is enough to stop him in his tracks.

"If you care at all for me," she says, "at least take the time to lie to me properly. Or aren't I friend enough to deserve that?"

And when his eyes meet hers once more, even the ridiculous film in front of them can't hide the quiet pain on her face, the steady pressure of her hands.

"I know," she says and puts her arms around his shoulders, gently and easily, not pushing him away when he presses tentatively against her. "It happened much the same way for me, all these many years back."

* * *

7.

She talks about her family the sixth day, her voice calm and tender and introspective, as though something buried deep inside her had sprung open at last.

He has never asked of them before and she has never offered to speak, though he had known she had been orphaned by his own motherland. And as he listens of the people she has lost-- a father whose books had been famed in Rabanastre and a mother whose potions had easily matched that, an eldest brother who had known how to interpret every chirp of a bird and a younger whose fists could have broken bangaa skin-- he realizes just how little he knows of people like her, how much his world simply fails to encompass.

"Forgive me," he says, when she finishes her stories, his fingers knotted helplessly in his lap. "Forgive me, on behalf of my empire. Forgive me for all that still stands."

Her mouth twitches almost despite herself. "What's to forgive? Who _should_ I forgive? You weren't responsible for any of that."

"And yet," he whispers, "my blood called for war and my empire answered and I… even as emperor, change still eludes us. Even as emperor, there is much I lack."

"No," she says, smiling almost impossibly, his fluttering to his throat as she did. "No, you're so much better than you imagine. There's so much you can do for the world."

And he looks and he looks and he looks at her, looking for some absolution, some way to change the past. "Then what _can_ I change? What _will_ I do?"

He expects her to plea just then, to answer an otherwise meaningless questions with answers made of slippery desire and subtle insinuations. If she had, he would not have blamed her; he has been used well enough even by those who had loved him to expect it, to understand the way his world functioned.

Perhaps he should have known that her words would surprise him here; every other part of her has already done as much.

"You'll do the best you can," she says gently. "I know you always have."

* * *

8.

It's then that he realizes that she expects nothing from him; then, that he realizes that he wants to give her everything he possibly can.

* * *

9.

He loses track of how many times he exits yet another tedious council meeting or assembly of the deposed and disgruntled, only to run across her telling rather outrageous lies of some of the goings of her native land.

"On the Giza plains," she will often begin piously, "there's a certain ritual my people have to reveal just who's your true love at last."

Usually, this will serve as the cue for the nobles of his court to edge just a bit closer, the women with genuine curiosity and the men with something rather less innocent than that.

"And?" They will usually prompt her. "What happens within it?"

And she will throw up her hands with a sigh and say, "I'm not sure outsiders should know. But surely you can keep a secret, yes? After all, it's not everyone who's brave enough to try tackling a pair of savage werewolf with only their favorite wench or chap standing at their back."

This is when they usually stop, every single tale they've ever heard of the barbarity of those to their south apparent in their startled breath.

"If we only manage to slice open a few arteries together," she chirps brightly, "we know we've found a potential partner at last. If we can drag each other's half-dead carcasses away, we have permission to marry. And if we can actually work together enough to slaughter them before we're eaten first? Well, _then_ we've found our true love's match! It really _is_ quite a fascinating cultural experience, even if it does keep our population a little low. And of course, it's still possible to participate this year… if you have the time, by chance?"

And this is usually when they start to inch away and she has bite her lip to keep from a tell-tale laugh.

"I suppose," she always concludes sweetly, "we're just not as sophisticated as you northerners are. But then, after all, we can't afford to get fancy. We _are_ just simple people of the sand."

He spends the first few days watching from the shadows, mustering smiles behind his volumous sleeves at the way she's decided to handle her interrogators. And when he finally plucks up the courage to question her completely, just her answer is enough to make him love her.

"I just think," she says, still half laughing, "that doing anything that shakes these high-and-mighty ninnies up a bit can't be all _that_ bad."

* * *

10.

They share a bed sometimes, but never in the way the gossips suspect, never in the way he guilty longs for, in the dark of night where he hopes beyond hope that she'll not suspect him capable of thinking of her in such acts.

He is much too young, he knows, for her to take him seriously in matters such as that. She might smile at him when he dresses for her, might look puzzled when they compare the rapidly shortening distance between his head and hers, might even cheerfully elbow him in his side when one of the even younger and lovelier serving girls Zargabaath has hired to "lift his spirits" give him yet another a come-hither glance.

But for all that, he knows that he is much too young for her tastes yet, that if she sighs for any in Archades, it is far more likely for his guardian than for him. But perhaps if it was just as well; if he had been to her more than a bereaved orphan, she wouldn't spend some nights stroking his hair till he feigns sleep, guarding him from the specters of the past.

If she sleeps next to him, then, he knows enough not to take it as any sort of invitation. For all the history his name holds, he knows that she trusts that he will not hurt her, even given the history of his kin. And perhaps this is why he never reaches out for her body, never lets himself plan the night deliberately, never so much as stirs an inch to bridge the gap between his lips and her skin.

And still, even those thoughts of friendship and camaraderie can't keep him from lying awake whenever she dreams at his side and thinking _what if_ and _when will_ and _one day, I can._

* * *

11.

He reads of the history of love whenever possible, scouring all the world that he knows for an answer to the uncertainties that Penelo riddles him with, to the indecisions her mere scent brings.

With a flush, he discards some of the racier novels he used to purloin from Drace's-- or what he rather _hopes_ is Drace's-- private and very personal collection. He passes over his brother's reading materials with a shudder, sure only that he does not wish to know whatever his brother once knew, and raises an astonished eyebrow at some of the recollections and even _sketches_ of Zecht (of all possible judges!) his father had left. He even goes so far as to delve into the recollections of the late Cidolfus Bunansa, only to realize that the parentage of the pirate Balthier was even more benighted than he cared to fully grap.

But it's in Gabranth's papers that he finds his real answer, however much the judge left in his place-- the false Gabranth, the un-Gabranth, the well-meaning but hopeless impostor who was nothing at all like the man-- had winced at the sight of his liege ransacking his quarters for some sign of the friend Larsa still needed, some sign of man Larsa would have treasured even more if Gabranth had been of _his_ flesh.

And it was within that search that he finds his answer, underlined in a journal he had once seen Gabranth wander about with, usually with Drace's armored palm guiltily clasped on his back.

_Love is not a solution,_ his friend had written. _Love is a question. _

_And answering it takes all that you have._

* * *

12.

He wonders, sometimes, if she can guess of how little used he is to human contact.

Even as an infant he had always loved and cherished, though less a child to be cooed at than an icon of purity given to the damned. His father had loved him and his brother had raised him and his judges had toppled over, trying to protect his worthless skin. He cannot recall a memory of any who have left him without remembering the words of praise they have given, the gifts they had made certain, the thousand simple protections they had ensured to guard his back.

And still, he cannot remember being touched by any of them beyond the age of seven. Gabranth alone had been the only one to have reached for him before death.

He had never thought to question it, however much he missed the feel of his father's shaky touch or his brother's infinitely gentle hands. Even then he had known all too well of the lonely roads along which power lay, of the sacrifices men of a great house often made to accommodate their station.

He had never questioned and he had never complained and does not think to do so now; he cannot change anything after the fact.

But when Penelo touches him now-- little touches, friendly glances, small, innocent, harmless gestures that would not be amiss when given to Vaan or Fran or Basch-- he does not turn away either, does not frown or flush or flinch or do any of the thousands of little motions to discourage mere peasantry from losing their awe of royalty's gilded station.

This might be all he ever has of her. He already knows that.

But when he closes his eyes and holds her close, all he can do is concentrate on the feel of her cheeks and her nails, her hair and her chin, the suffusing warmth of her arms as she moves to embrace him back.

* * *

13.

"Do you ever think I'm anything like my brother?" he asks her out of the blue after one wretched evening spent in front of Vayne's portrait, eying them in a painted trance. "Do you suppose I shall grow to be like him? Shall resemble him as a man?"

He keeps his head down as he asks her; he has always been a coward when it comes to the way she looks at him, as though there was something to be salvaged beyond pride of his rank.

"No," she replies, looking very curious. "Why would you ever think that?"

He tries to smile but can't quite manage. "Do I really need a reason to ask?"

"Because I don't," she says quietly when his voice dies again. "I don't think so and I never will. You could never be that cruel or that crazy or that plotty… and that's not even going into the differences between you two that--"

She makes an extravagant gesture at his head, smiling.

"--anyone with half a brain could pick out at a glance."

He has to pause. "Do you mean the difference between my mind and his?"

"No," she answers possibly. "Though that makes sense as well. But I was asking thinking about your hair. I mean, yours is so glorious, so smooth and so pretty, while his was..."

Despite himself, he glances at his portrait and the smile he gives is actually authentic; he nearly wants to laugh.

"Well, your brother's hair just _was_, Larsa. And it certainly _was_, at that. Homicidal mania aside, I'm surprised nobody tried to overthrow him earlier. How could anyone think someone could rule an empire if he couldn't even deal with whatever it was that was trying to take over his neck?"

* * *

14.

"He wanted me to be like him," Larsa whispers in the dark after his smile had faded, the crystals around them dimmed so that she can't see his face, can't see his eyes, can't see all the ways he is brother's reflection turned small, clammy and incapable. "That was what he wanted most from the world, what he tried so badly to have. All he tried to take from me was everything-- heart and mind, soul and body, so he could use me as a puppet even after his death."

She reaches out for him then, hands sliding gently against his coarsening face-- the skin there already peppered with raised dots, the once soft nose already lengthening into the beak of a proper Solidor man.

"I wish I could hate him," he continues, voice faint and nearly gravelly. "He would deserve it. At his end, he was more monster than man."

She says nothing, knowing that there's nothing to actually rationalize, nothing to do but try and understand.

"But I loved him," he says, and his heart is breaking. "I still _love_ him. And I don't know-- I don't _want_ to know-- how I can bring myself to cease doing that."

And even he knows there's nothing left to say and no one left to see and nothing yet to grasp of the past. So he closes his eyes and buries his face in her shoulder, holding her as closely as he dares to at present. And when she sighs and folds her arms around him in the darkness, her hair against his face feels like the feathers of a thousand birds, all arching up for the flight ahead.

She would not do this if she thought he was as his brother, Larsa knows. And even after she leaves him, after the scent of her has faded from his bed and the last of her footsteps have ceased in his halls, he will carry with him still the gentle certainty of that.

* * *

15.

He walks the lonely halls of his palace the nights after, trying to track down the echoes of ghosts, of whatever fragments might still linger of the lives that have ceased there. And when he does, Penelo waits and stirs and watches and follows, making sure he always dresses warmly enough for his excursions, making sure that if he lingers like a spirit himself, he at least has a fellow ghast.

"I sometimes wish I could have seen the haunts you've seen during your journeys," he confesses one hopeless night. "I don't care for anyone in particular, just-- anything that can point to the past. Any being who could possibly tell me where we go when we die, and if there really_is_ a way for us to reunite after that."

"Me too," she says softly, and her hands slide against his shoulders again, so simple and so easy, light in the midst of the black. "But then I realized that even when I _do_ see them, I never figure it out until it's too late."

"Not too paranormally inclined?" he murmurs, amused.

"Hell no," she returns with a laugh. "You should leave that sort of thing to the _real_ crazies-- which means, of course, Vaan and Ashe."

And he smiles as she wants him to but he cannot stop, he cannot wait, he cannot let them merely fade and die.

He still wants to call them back.

"I tried too," Penelo tells him softly, after watching him lie in Drace's bed for the third night running, trying to understand why she had sacrificed herself with his life still at hand. "But then I realized that the people you love, they never really leave you. The past is never really just the past."

"How can you be so sure?" he whispers. "How can you keep them all with you? What could possibly give you that right?"

Her fingers are warm when they close around his own, when she looks down and sighs.

"I don't know what you want to hear, Larsa. I don't know what answer would suit you best. But I've always thought that if I still remembered my family, it was less because I thought of them than because they still thought of_me_. Even if you live in the present, it doesn't mean you forget the past."

* * *

16.

The day after, he goes to the small chapel adjoined to his state room-- to what had once been his father's and then his brother's offices-- and goes down on his knees for the first time since the Bahamut had fallen.

Prayer had never been an accepted part of his family's practices; though the Solidor had always paid lip service to the study of the gods, his house had always much preferred to use them as an opiate to control history and the masses.

But now he is on his knees and he is not quite sure if he is praying, or what he prays to, or even if any deity would stop and listen. But he is on his knees and he cannot help but speak freely, hoping that if he does this, at least some of the ghosts that flock around will find a good end.

"Think of me," he finally says, and knows not who he addresses. "Think of me and know that the better part of all of you remains in me still yet. I cannot let you fully go-- I _will not_ let you fully go. But perhaps I can at least let you rest at last."

There is miracle that follows after, no crack of thunder or trill of bird song or shaft of light that illuminates the stage after he lifts himself up again. But his heart feels oddly light in his chest after that. And when Penelo cocks her head and indignantly asks what kept him from being trounced in yet another game of hopscotch, all he can do is smile and ask her to refrain from tackling him when he defeats her yet again.

* * *

17.

As the days go by, he grows accustomed to holding her hand and hearing her voice and waking up to find her lovely spring of curls mingling with his own hair. And as the days tumble into weeks and even (Larsa counts carefully) edge towards a month, they learn to eat together and sleep together, play together and ride together, dance together and even conspire in twain-- all of which are enough, as he had feared, to build her reputation as the Emperor's imported whore and push all too many interested parties to try and refurbish that station.

"But you're only thirteen," she all but hisses when she first hears of their plans, fingers raking hastily through and ruining her butter-yellow braids. "You're just a little boy and how can they even think-- how could they--?"

"I am old enough in the eyes of Archadia," he tells her, feeling worn-out and faded and almost thrice his years. "Old enough, in the views of the blue bloods, to choose someone to thrust a heir upon, if only for the empire's sake."

He does not add that the upper class in Archades wants, more than anything, for her to simply vanish, to cleanse him of scent of foreign seduction and sympathy for those they have wronged often enough for revenge.

"And what if," she replies, mouth tense with anger, "I kidnap you for a while so that you don't have to go to any damn functions to pick out some girl you barely know to serve as your-- your-- your _brood mare_?"

"Then I should probably start on that imperial pardon so that you aren't immediately executed as soon as you return," he answers and finds, with a surprise so deep it touches upon appreciation, that he almost wants to laugh.

* * *

18.

True to her word, and to his sources, she finds a way to spirit him away soon enough. She has not yet become the sky pirate that Vaan periodically promises to fashion her into... but there is still persuasion and power in her stride and her smile, and what her hips cannot persuade men to do, her prowess in green magic can.

And still his hand shakes in hers as she helps him up the narrow stairs of a newly stolen airship, no matter how clearly he knows that it is his right to defy the wills of others, to follow his own path.

"Forgive me," he finds himself saying, almost stuttering. "I… I know you have the best of intentions in this and I do not doubt your kindness. But I cannot help but wonder if I should stay regardless of the madness of my subjects. Surely shirking my duties to… to give Archadia the heir it needs is a sort of cruelty to them. Perhaps my counselors are right after all. Perhaps I can…"

Her face stops his voice dead. And as he looks at her in that moment, he does not think he has ever witnessed anything near so beautiful in all his life or ever will again.

"Don't be afraid to bite the hand that feeds you," she says quietly. "It's the one that holds your leash as well."

* * *

19.

She takes him to the coast during their disappearance, and it's possibly the best week of Larsa has ever had since everything had broken down in his world without his knowing quite how or why. They bring along just enough to live extravagantly and spend their days hunting monsters and sipping illicit drinks and simply idling in the sand. He tries to teach her how to swim and ends up conceding defeat when she spends the majority of her time in her water clinging to him frantically-- not that there is much in _that_ that he minds. She shows him how to throw a punch against the weaker beasts that cross their path, coaxes him into shedding the heaviest of his finery and teaches him the best way to kick sand into the eyes of his empire that might otherwise fetch him back. They string flowers into their hair and eat their food with their fingers and move their bodies to music when it comes, she looping her arms casually around his neck while he frantically tries to keep upright.

And if he holds her too tight sometimes-- if his grip is unsteady and if his breath is uneasy-- he cannot help it, cannot stop trying. She'll leave soon, he can feel it in his bones, and this is her way of giving one last goodbye.

There are so many things he wants to ask her, so many ways of delaying farewell, so many possible hows and whens and whys. If he had the courage, he could have found ways to keep tabs on her even afterwards, to chart the course of her life. If he had the wit, he could have tried to contrive a way to keep her with him, to use her kind heart against her until his path and hers were intertwined.

And if he had yet an unbroken heart, he could have asked her if she loved him, if she could one day think of sharing not merely his home or his hope but also his life.

He has none of that, though-- not when it comes to her anyway. And so he shyly touches a yellow curl resting upon her cheek and asks her if she will, perhaps, be kind enough to pen him the occasional letter or two, once she leaves his side.

"You needn't if you have not the time," he says, and fastens his face upon her forehead, avoiding her curious eyes. "But-- you've been so kind and if there is anything I can do to repay you, anything my station can offer you, never feel as though I have not the time--"

She stops him short by looking a bit offended. "Larsa, you didn't really think I came here to help you just to get a few favors out of you, right?"

"No," he stutters, though of course he has. "I had just-- just wondered if we were-- if it were all right to ask you-- if I…"

She tilts her head, looking bemused and alight. "If I?"

"If I was your friend," he says in a hurry, aware he is being a colossal fool, aware that he cannot stop himself either. "If I… was perhaps someone who you appreciate dearly? Perhaps… perhaps someone who you could speak to, anytime you needed any sort of help in your life?"

And he is _such_ a fool but the look on her face is worth it, worth all the blunders he could ever make in her presence all the while.

"Of course," she returns, radiant in the mid-afternoon sun. "Of course you are, Larsa, even when I don't understand half the words you say sometimes. After all--" And she tilts her head, eyes still shining, a portrait he will carry for life. "Would I really put up with your crazy eyes if you weren't a great friend?"

* * *

20.

And on what feels like the last day in all the world together, they lie on the beach with the sunset before them, hand already in hand.

Somewhere, he knows, beyond the sunlight they presently share, Archades waits like a pitfall made of ambition, power and glass. And somewhere beyond the sand they're anchored in, he knows there are places she will go where he cannot follow, people she will meet that he will not care for, decisions she will follow that might make the slender thread of connection between them sever, spindle, snap.

The light that warms them is clean and merciful but the past lay behind him and the present was the present and the future was already coming to pass. And he closes his eyes and wonders if this will be the last he will come to know of her, if the world around them will soon swallow her up and steal her steps and leave him with nothing but ash.

"What are you thinking of?" she interrupts, her nails snagging at his still fine sleeve, at ungloved, still clean hands.

And he sighs and thinks and settles on the truth. "Of the future and the present. Of the time and the world. Of the two of us and what we could make of ourselves some day, if we can survive to see that."

The hope on her face is almost painful to see. "So... can you picture us being happy? Do you think we'll both do alright, despite the world always being so mad?"

And he knows nothing yet of what the years will bring and what the world will take back.

He knows nothing yet of the love letters he will pen for her, of the missives she will send and the messengers who will carry it and the many ways his worlds will find her, no matter how ardently she seeks other lands.

He knows nothing of the presents she will give, of the children she will bear, even of the nicknames she will make him shoulder, half-joyous and half-laughing, as the blunders of his life trickle past.

He knows nothing yet of the feel of her lips, of the roundness of her body during pregnancy, of the illness that will waste away her form near her end but never erase the beautiful crinkles that will accumulate around her eyes from years of laughs.

He knows nothing yet of the aches of his old age, of the weight of his grandchildren in his arms, of the hope in his heart when time flies soon enough 'til he finds himself here once more, memories of her returning with every sight and every sound and every scent and every single wave that edges against his worn body, that will find a way to deliver him to all that he loves at last.

He doesn't know yet of any of the wonders he'll see soon enough, of the death that he'll seek fifty years later, of being an old man willing himself gently and painlessly to death. But somehow, despite all that, perhaps he realizes what will happen soon enough.

Perhaps some part of him already understands.

And so, he simply rests his head on her shoulder and finally, and softly, laughs.

"Yes," he says, and he cannot stop smiling. "Yes, I think we'll do just that."


End file.
